Posts by Dennis Frank
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Legal Beagle: Election 2017: the Special…, in reply to simon g,
the real election result
Ain't all over till the volumetrically-challenged woman sings, as they'd say if they were pc-driven. But I agree with your point.
The real election result emanated from the EC, but only in respect of the final tallies in the electorates. Many of us view the real election result as the formation of the new government. I wonder if Winston will announce it alone, or jointly with the leader of the majority party in it?
Some of the electorate final tallies are interesting, such as those where the Green candidate got an electorate percentage significantly above the GP party vote across the nation. James Shaw got 15% of the vote in Wellington Central, where the GP even got 21% of the party vote. So 6% of voters in that electorate were green voters who voted against the leader of the Greens. Any one of them who reads this, please explain your rationale!
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I'm sympathetic to the diversity perspective, and confident the ALCP would have prospered under MMP with no threshold since cannabis users passed the majority here some years ago according to polls (albeit that many would have voted for established parties for other reasons).
Proliferating sectarianism is the downside: last count I saw christians had globally subdivided into more than 4000 sects. Or was it 40,000? Anyway voters would probably be more restrained due to the disincentive of wasting their votes on the diminishing returns of proliferation. But the clamour for air-time would irritate many!
Whilst it seems a shame that the Maori Party & TOP have been relegated, they now have the opportunity to demonstrate resilience and durability. I was one of the 7% of the electorate who voted for the Greens in 1990 under FPP, and promptly joined them to help make them successful. If a party has brand authenticity likely to resonate with a significant portion of the electorate, it ought to consolidate.
ACT seems to have proven that durability is possible without authenticity - with another party link providing a life-support system. Roger Douglas probably thought founding the party on the mutual-interest basis shared by consumers and taxpayers was a good idea since there are plenty of both, but voters seem not to have believed that ACT was genuinely representing them on that basis. ACT reps have jointly trashed their brand, making it toxic to voters. Authenticity is the lesson to learn.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Sacha,
Like the German green realos vs fundis?
Interesting question. The easy answer is yes, but political reality is always composed of nuances and complexities, so the simplest response is misleading. Political reality is created via praxis (rather than via political philosophy or values).
You can probably say that alignments and paradigms (belief systems) create the political context in which the players operate, but I believe identifications are the primary motivators because they produce tribal affiliations ("these people are my crowd, I belong here"). The rise of identity politics in the commentariat was produced by the global shift away from ideology in the seventies.
But the deeper answer to your question explains the realos/fundis divide as pragmatists versus purists: those prioritising short-term gains from compromising their principles & those prioritising adherence to their trajectory toward the sustainable society. It's a false dichotomy in my opinion: competent political players can do both simultaneously.
From an holistic perspective, the common good or public interest is best served by those who collaborate to do so, and their praxis is what produces the real progress that politics sometimes produces. Our problems derive from identity politics promoting (sectarianism) competition between groups rather than collaboration between them - which is what MMP was meant to enhance. So our current challenge is to make the MoU work & extend consensus to include NZF in order to get the change to a better government.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Sacha,
Do we know where the earlier Values party supporters saw themselves?
Only partially: their schism was created when those who were not leftists and those who were became unable to collaborate any further. Only someone who participated could say if it was a 50:50 split. That's the members. As far as voting supporters goes, I don't recall if polling was done to find out - maybe someone else here knows? I'd guess that they'd all self-identify as progressive, whereas Labour pretended to be progressive but was obviously part of the establishment.
Because I was part of the earlier more-radical green movement, I never took Values seriously, only voting for them in '78 because Shadbolt had become one of them. They were suit-wearers, so nobody in the counter-culture identified with them in the early seventies, and the counter-culture was mostly apolitical anyway. We were non-violent in those years when radical leftists were fighting the establishment in countries all over the world. Fighting doesn't work anymore. We sussed that in the sixties as teenagers, so the leftists in our generation seemed antiquated. But I hung out in the Resistance Bookshop with them. It was just across the road from the Town Hall in Ak, constantly full of people with hair as long as you could get it to grow, an intense ferment of a multitude of simultaneous conversations, very trendy...
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to Sacha,
I joined the Greens after the 1990 election because they got 7% of the total vote, so I read that as indicating enough of the public were rejecting the left & right to make a better future viable. Worth spending my time & energy on. So, because that was prior to the party deciding to adopt the leftist parliamentary alignment, the party was representing the Green movement on the authentic basis.
When I later persuaded our conference to adopt the leftist alignment, I did so with emphatic advocacy because the Bolger govt had recently enlisted leading environmentalists and the spectre of National capturing the Green movement in Aotearoa loomed large at the time. The need for us to oppose that trend was essential & I don't resile from what I did but do regret inadvertent creation of the sectarianism within the party that has become toxic.
Seeing that 7% as the bedrock real Green support base, I've watched the oscillations around it at every election since. I predict that special votes will bring the current Green vote up to that and confirm that my opinion remains valid.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to BenWilson,
I put it to you that the average Green position on the Left-Right direction is NOT in the middle, it is NOT more Right wing than Labour. I agree that it is more "Green" than Labour.
Yes, that's the warping effect of the leftist parliamentary alignment. The alignment warps the position of the Green movement in the public mind because it confines Green political representation to the leftist Greens only. As you note, we agree this allows our leftist greenies to differentiate themselves from Labour, but do you not see the disenfranchisement it causes to the authentic Greens within the party? Those who self-identify as neither left nor right, I mean. Those who entered politics to represent the entire Green movement on an authentic basis.
I get the definite impression that you either don't believe people like me exist, or you don't believe the Green Party ought to represent us. It puzzles me. I empathise with the concern you expressed re going with the Nats, but I don't go along with your assumptions around doing so. For instance I can't currently think of any of our current policies that I'd support changing. The Political Compass website located me precisely in the center of the left-libertarian quadrant: the red dot showed up on my certificate printout right in the middle of Bernie Sanders' face. But values politics making me an archetypal leftist doesn't affect my choice to reject both left & right political alignments which has guided me continuously since 1971 (identity politics frame). It's identity politics which creates the political contexts for folks to work together for mutual benefits.
Collaboration derives more from people identifying with each other than shared values. Have you operated as a political activist? If so, in what contexts? Participation often changes our views, I've found. Most blog commentators seem to lack practical political experience. When someone comments from both personal experience as well as a dispassionate observer's perspective, that combination of insider & outsider views conveys more helpful information to interested others...
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to BenWilson,
I think we are talking at cross purposes, because I am referring to what people who actually vote Green think
Yes, that's true. Green voters are likely to be mostly influenced by the combination of Green policies and the leftist parliamentary alignment, but you seem to be discounting those who have (like me) been part of the Green movement their whole lives and vote Green in rejection of the left/right accordingly. This portion of the electorate is larger than all the swing-voters combined, and the latter group produces most of our election outcomes, so discounting the larger group is a big mistake!
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to BenWilson,
I assure you, they are of the Left
I assure you they aren't. That's just your perception, not the reality. To get the reality (acknowledge the twin tribes within) you'll have to ditch that binary frame you're using. The triadic frame originated in the late sixties, so the only valid excuse for ignorance that younger generations have is that they're too busy struggling to survive to learn from history. Okay, fair enough, but why not try another tribal view from the real Greens, that of Nandor Tanczos: https://nandor.net.nz/2017/09/29/the-politics-of-green-coalitions/
His view is from a much younger generation than me, but he's correct nonetheless. So it is actually possible for younger Greens to suss the deep nature of political reality - it's only the ideological blinkers they wear that prevent leftist greens from seeing the big picture. However they have no valid excuse for their unethical conduct when they try to get away with their pretence that non-aligned Greens don't exist, when they still constitute the unrepresented tribe within the Green Party.
Such behaviour is also undemocratic. Our leftists should be ashamed of themselves. Democracy is meant to be inclusive, and in our era that means minority groups get to be recognised and represented. And Russel Norman's straw poll at our 2015 conference is evidence that our tribe is actually bigger than the leftist greens.
Remember when James Shaw told us that 18% of voters in the 2014 election considered voting Green but didn't? I suggested the Greens explore this potential via further polling. I take the fact that we've not been informed of progress on that as implying that they did but didn't like what they discovered: relatively few such potential Green voters are leftists. That's why the leftist parliamentary alignment is operating as a hand-brake on the progress of the Greens in Aotearoa.
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to BenWilson,
Keep talking up the blue greens.
I'm not. Have never felt the slightest inclination to do so. I'm commenting on how the Nats' desperation to conjure up an alternative to Winston is playing in our media, and the bearing that the play has on our collective destiny.
With regard to that, it became obvious long ago that the future of western civilisation requires us to shift towards a sustainable society. I joined the Greens after the 1990 election to help make it happen. We were anti-establishment twenty years earlier, due to the left being as much a part of the problem as the right. That's why we became neither left nor right. If the left ever decides to co-create a sustainable society with us, I'll be delighted. I have no problem giving our leftist greenies credit for the work they've been doing to make it happen (whilst criticising them for preventing us representing the Green movement as a whole).
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Hard News: The Day After Tomorrow, in reply to BenWilson,
Oh well I guess they don't need to red-green votes then, and can stick to the blue-green ones they already have.
You don't believe that Jacinda already recaptured all the ex-Labour voters who had drifted into the Green camp? How else do you explain the 10% drop??